Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 24, 2013 @04:38PM
from the no-one-can-hear-you-bleep-in-space dept.

jrepin writes "On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke about the 'Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles.' In his talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond. Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to spacecraft."

In his team, they have a full-size Justin Bieber cutout that gets placed facing the team member who broke the build. They found that "100% of software engineers don't like Justin Bieber", and will work quickly to fix the build problem.

You see, that's why you have overflowing prisons. This would easily reduce the crime rate by a factor of ten!

Doubtful. At my $lastjob we had a rule that if you broke the nightly build you bought doughnuts for everyone. And the project lead would rip you a new one.

Despite my admonitions to not check stuff in at the end of the day we had two guys that just couldn't figure it out. One of them worked in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) and he'd check stuff in at the end of his day and go home, meaning we'd be stuck with the dirty job of backing his stuff out so that we could proceed.

And the local guy would whine and cry about how it wasn't his fault, it worked in his tree, yada yada yada. Well, his tree was usually a few days out of date by the time he was ready to check his stuff in, and he just couldn't get the knack of rebasing his tree and building before committing to the master. Sheesh. This stuff isn't rocket science. And as I said, he insisted on doing this at the end of the day – every time. Eventually it cost him his job.

So no, I don't believe the threat of being stared at by a full size cutout of the Biebs would solve crime either.

And they spent years, millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours doing so. I'm sure that the folks at NASA are pretty happy with modern toolsets. My father worked on the Saturn V instrumentation - Op Amps the size of cigarette boxes, telemetry transmitters the size of breadboxes with 300 baud max speeds. Graph paper. Slide rules. Simple changes requiring weeks of rework.

Linux and associated bits and pieces are a big step in the right direction.

No, no. You must be new here. The moderation system is there so you can impose your opinion on otherwise reasonable posts. That's what it's used for, that's what it's best at, Slashdot refuses to change it (I'd say fix it, but it appears to be working as intended) and so... one must conclude that is what it was designed for.

Now THAT is hilarious. Complaining that malloc is non-deterministic and then alluding to dependence upon garbage collection. I get the distinct impression you've never written anything requiring high performance memory allocation/deallocation.